Inside Howard County’s school bus crisis: Everything that went wrong before Zum’s launch

Two days before Zum’s roughly 200 brand-new buses would file out of their Jessup bus yard and pick up thousands of Howard County students for the first time, the transportation company was caught off guard — school system leaders had changed some of the bus routes, and some of them contained errors. Some routes that previously called for buses now needed vans. Some of the routes listed zero kids for pickup. And their new drivers, many unfamiliar with the area, wouldn’t have a chance to do a test run of the revised routes.